Intro
Bloomberg correspondent Matthew Hill, just back from Zambia, and Wits University political scientist Nicole Beardsworth take apart President Hakainde Hichilema's disputed re-election: the debt workout, IMF program and mining investment that made him a market favorite, the vote-count discrepancies researchers and observers have flagged, the police raid that killed a former minister, and how the local bond market and the kwacha have responded since.
Guest: Matthew Hill, Bloomberg correspondent, who covered the election from Zambia
Also on: Nicole Beardsworth, lecturer in political science, Wits University
Host: Jennifer Zabasaja
Published: 28 August 2026 on Next Africa
Listen on Omny | 20 min
Key Takeaways
The market read the result as continuity, and bought it
A local currency bond auction last week was "well oversubscribed", and "the yields on that debt, more specifically on the 10-year benchmark bonds, fell by over 100 basis points" — Hill
Hichilema is "seen as very market-friendly, very pro-business, and generally well-liked by investors" — Hill
The currency is telling the other half of the story
The kwacha is still "Africa's best performing currency this year", but "it's depreciated every day for the past five days and weakened to a level last seen in April" — Hill
An official landslide bigger than the last one
"He was declared the winner with nearly 61% of the vote, which actually even beat his landslide victory five years ago" — Hill
Copper and the debt workout are the investment case
Policy stability has "helped to attract billions of dollars in mining investment at a time when prices for copper, which is by far Zambia's biggest export, are near a record" — Hill
He came in with the country in default and "had mostly successfully navigated a very complex and painful debt restructuring"
The macro fix was paid for at household level
The restructuring required "the removal of electricity subsidies, and the removal of fuel subsidies", and "since 2021, the cost of a basic needs basket has increased by 40%" — Beardsworth
Popularity was not the problem going in
Beardsworth's 2025 survey put Hichilema's approval at 79%, on free education, welfare grants and a bigger Constituency Development Fund
A vote-count gap that observers and monitors have since echoed
Sixteen constituencies produced "over 170,000 votes difference between the presidential and parliamentary votes", scaled nationally to a range in the hundreds of thousands — Beardsworth
The political tail risk is now legal and physical, not electoral
Eleven people arrested and still held, a former minister killed in the raid, and the opposition presidential candidate sheltering in a UN compound with his release "being negotiated at the highest levels in New York" — Beardsworth
The government is answering with a security frame, not a count
Hill: the state has alleged militia activity, illegal automatic weapons and "people getting military training in Russia"; the opposition leader has denied all of it
An Election Full of Surprises
Zabasaja set the episode up around the promise Hichilema made when he swept to power five years ago — a "better democracy" — and asked whether that promise is now under threat after a result she said had been tainted by accusations of irregularities, the killing of a former minister and what the UN has called arbitrary arrests
Her framing for the week: "the country that was once seen as the shining light for democracy in the region could be failing its first real test"
Hill's headline is that nothing about the vote went to script: "First I would say it's been an election that is full of surprises."
The first surprise was the opposition's late organization — "an opposition that had essentially been very splintered and disorganized in the months and years ahead of the vote had managed to mobilize in the immediate run-up to the elections" and, in the end, put up a fight
The second was the size of the official win: "He was declared the winner with nearly 61% of the vote, which actually even beat his landslide victory five years ago"
The third, and to Hill the biggest, was the direction of travel: "maybe the biggest surprise is how the democratic space in Zambia has deteriorated in these elections and all the somewhat shocking events since"
"We've had a former minister that was shot dead by police in a raid on an opposition leader's house a day after the vote"
"the United Nations has called for an end to arbitrary arrests in Zambia since the elections"
Zabasaja's own read going in, as someone who has covered Hichilema for years, was that this looked like a formality — business as usual for the incumbent — and it did not turn out that way
The Hichilema Record: Default, Debt Restructuring and a Copper Boom
Hill describes Hichilema as one of Zambia's wealthiest businessmen and an economist who spent almost two decades in opposition before winning
The inheritance was a sovereign default: "When he finally won power in 2021, he took over an economy that was in a real mess. The country was in default."
The signature achievement for investors is the workout — he "had mostly successfully navigated a very complex and painful debt restructuring"
Then came the weather: 2024 brought "the worst drought that Zambia had seen in decades, that knocked out the country's hydropower generation" and decimated crops
Through all of it, "his government oversaw a successful program with the International Monetary Fund", and the administration points to "free education for all Zambians as its biggest success"
The investment story Hill puts at the center of the incumbency: more stable economic policies "have helped to attract billions of dollars in mining investment at a time when prices for copper, which is by far Zambia's biggest export, are near a record"
The demand side he names is structural, not cyclical — "demand for the metal is rising rapidly from new technologies like electric vehicles and also, of course, some data centers"
Why the Cost of Living Turned Against the Ruling Party
Hill's split screen: the administration can point to a lot of economic successes, and at the same time "life has been incredibly tough for the majority poor population in Zambia in recent years"
The drought's second-order effects did the political damage — power outages that would sometimes last a couple of days, with people going without power entirely
"It caused inflation to spike above 20%", and incomes did not come close to keeping up
That is the opening the opposition used: "the main opposition leader, Brian Mundubile, could really point to the difficulties that the majority of the population has faced", with a promise to make life better if he won
The question was then put to Beardsworth to reconcile the two dynamics — the macroeconomic wins against the household squeeze
What the Polling Showed Before the Vote
Beardsworth's Zambia Elections Research Network ran its first survey round in 2025 and found "HH had a popularity rating of 79%, which is really quite remarkable"
The approval was policy-driven, and she names three: free education, social welfare grants, and the increase in the Constituency Development Fund — all of which ranked very highly in voters' approval ratings of the president
On the international side she credits him with enabling the conditions that let Zambia climb out of its debt default — but says the price was specific and unpopular
"such as the removal of electricity subsidies, and the removal of fuel subsidies"
Her central point is the gap between the aggregate and the household: the country is on a much better footing at the macroeconomic level, but "since 2021, the cost of a basic needs basket has increased by 40%, and people's salaries have not increased by the same margin"
She ties that squeeze directly back to the sovereign side — the debt restructuring and the IMF program agreed around 2024
The Gap Between the Presidential and Parliamentary Counts
In the days after the results were announced, Beardsworth heard repeated reports of discrepancies between the presidential and the parliamentary results, and set out to test them
Her method was a direct comparison: compile the publicly available presidential results, then work through every reported parliamentary result she could find, starting with 16 constituencies
"What we found in the end was over 170,000 votes difference between the presidential and parliamentary votes in those 16 seats"
Scaling that to the country, "we estimated that there'd probably be somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 votes difference between the two races when we adjust for the entire country"
Zabasaja drew the line explicitly around what the numbers do and do not prove: "we can't make the connection between these numbers and what exactly happened. We don't have that evidence." The point was to follow the numbers and map what the data showed
Beardsworth agreed that on its own it was one data point — what changed the picture was what came after
Journalistic accounts of anomalies at election tallying centers and at polling stations themselves
"reports from the Christian Churches Monitoring Group and Transparency International Zambia, which seems to confirm a lot of the things that we found in our analysis"
A statement from the EU's election observation mission after tabulation, highlighting problems with the results and with how the announcements proceeded
Bonds Rallied, the Kwacha Slipped
Asked whether any of this is showing up in prices, Hill splits the answer between the two local markets
The bond market voted for continuity: Zambia "held a local currency bond auction last week, which was well oversubscribed"
"the yields on that debt, more specifically on the 10-year benchmark bonds, fell by over 100 basis points"
His read of that move is a straight endorsement of the incumbent: "investors do seem to have roundly welcomed the re-election of President Hichilema. He's seen as very market-friendly, very pro-business, and generally well-liked by investors"
The currency has gone the other way: "we've seen a gradual depreciation of the Zambian kwacha, which, until now, is still Africa's best performing currency this year"
"it's depreciated every day for the past five days and weakened to a level last seen in April"
Hill's own summary of the split is that there has been a market reaction on both sides — positive in local currency bonds, and more negative in the currency itself
What a Petition Would Have to Clear
Zabasaja raised the possibility of a rerun and pushed back on it in the same breath, noting that disputed elections have happened repeatedly in the region and globally and that a rerun is not a silver bullet
Beardsworth's answer is procedural: nothing about a rerun can be determined until the results are petitioned, most often by the opposition presidential candidate — and the opposition has been in no position to file
On the night of the results announcement, 14 August, one of the opposition's properties was raided; "11 people were arrested and detained without charge", and to her knowledge 11 people are still being held
A former minister, Mutotwe Kafwaya, was killed in that raid
The presidential candidate, Brian Mundubile, and his running mate "sought refuge in the U.N. compound" and are still there
"their release is now being negotiated at the highest levels in New York at the U.N."
What has been filed instead came from outside the campaign — the Chief Justice has announced that a member of the public, Linda Kasonde, and a couple of other litigants have put together "what they call the People's Petition against the election results"
Beardsworth is not optimistic about where that lands. The Constitutional Court's test is whether the problems with the vote were enough to affect the outcome, and "in previous elections, they have found that they were not enough to affect the outcome and therefore the election results stand"
She expects a similar dynamic here even if the petition is heard, "which is, I think, a fairly big if at this point"
The Government's Answer: A State Security Framing
Hill says the government has not engaged with the count at all, and has instead reframed the aftermath: "the government has taken quite an aggressive stance, trying to paint the environment around its actions as being one of a threat to state security"
Police and other government institutions have made "allegations of people getting military training in Russia", and have spoken of a militia being at Mundubile's house during the deadly raid, claiming they found illegal automatic weapons there
Hill puts the denial on the record in the same breath: "Mundubile has refuted all of these claims, said he's not involved in any kind of militia, he's not involved in any kind of insurrection, and we've also not seen any evidence of this in court"
He also took the irregularity evidence — Beardsworth's work and the Christian Churches Monitoring Group's — to a spokesman for Hichilema
The response he got was a refusal to go past the official result: "we follow the official declaration by the Electoral Commission of Zambia that President Hakainde Hichilema has been duly re-elected"
Also Across the Region This Week
Zabasaja closed with two other stories the show has been following
Uganda's army chief, the son of long-serving President Yoweri Museveni, said he plans to run for the presidency in 2031, when the country next holds elections
Kenya Airways said it is weeks away from unveiling a proposal to sell a stake to a strategic investor, almost a decade after the flag carrier first embarked on the plan, and has drawn interest from several potential suitors who approached the airline, according to its chief executive officer
Hill's bottom line is that Zambia's investment case and its political case have separated: the debt workout, the IMF program and record-priced copper still make the incumbent the trade investors want, and the local bond market has priced that, while the currency, a killing, eleven people held without charge and an opposition candidate inside a UN compound are the part of the story the yield curve has not yet answered for.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Copper (Zambia's biggest export by far, near a record price, with demand rising from electric vehicles and data centers — the pull behind billions of dollars of mining investment)
International Monetary Fund (The program Hill credits Hichilema's government with running successfully through the default workout and the drought; Beardsworth dates the agreement to around 2024 and links its conditions to the household squeeze)
Electoral Commission of Zambia (The body whose declaration the presidency's spokesman cited as the entirety of its answer to the irregularity findings)
United Nations (Called for an end to arbitrary arrests in Zambia since the vote; its compound is sheltering the opposition presidential candidate and his running mate, with their release negotiated in New York)
Christian Churches Monitoring Group and Transparency International Zambia (Domestic monitors whose reports Beardsworth says appear to confirm much of what her own count analysis found)
EU election observation mission (Issued a statement after tabulation highlighting problems with the results and the way the announcements proceeded)
Zambian Constitutional Court (Would hear any petition; its test is whether the problems were enough to affect the outcome, and it has previously found they were not)
Kenya Airways (Weeks from a proposal to sell a stake to a strategic investor, a decade after first attempting it, with several suitors said to have approached the airline)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Nicole Beardsworth's published piece on the Zambian election (Zabasaja pointed listeners to it as the write-up of the presidential-versus-parliamentary vote comparison)
The Zambia Elections Research Network survey (Its 2025 first round produced the 79% presidential approval reading and the policy rankings behind it)
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